{"id":45894,"date":"2016-03-04T01:12:47","date_gmt":"2016-03-04T01:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45894"},"modified":"2017-01-06T01:41:43","modified_gmt":"2017-01-06T01:41:43","slug":"hollywoods-obsession-with-the-bottom-line-is-just-discrimination-in-disguise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45894","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood’s Obsession With the Bottom Line Is Just Discrimination in Disguise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hollywood’s Obsession With the Bottom Line Is Just Discrimination in Disguise<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Cosmopolitan<\/a>
\n2016-02-25<\/p>\n

Stephanie Allain<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Stephanie Allain has worked in Hollywood<\/a> for more than 30 years, both in and out of the studio system. She’s produced award-winning films including <\/em>Hustle & Flow<\/a>, <\/em>Peeples<\/a>, <\/em>Beyond the Lights<\/a>, and <\/em>Dear White People<\/a>. Her next projects include <\/em>Underground, a film about frat hazing at historically black colleges, for Netflix, and Crushed, a half-hour comedy for Lionsgate\/Hulu inspired by the only black-owned family vineyard in Napa<\/a>. She is also director of the L.A. Film Festival<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1990, I interviewed a young man to replace me as a script reader<\/a> in the story department of Columbia Pictures<\/a>. That man was 22-year-old John Singleton<\/a>, and he couldn’t care less about the reader job. Instead, he pitched me his script about three young kids in South Central<\/a> called Boyz N the Hood<\/em><\/a>. When I got it from his agent, I closed the door to my tiny office and read it cover-to-cover. Up until then, I had been imitating my white mentors, Amy Pascal<\/a> and Dawn Steel<\/a>, culling the town for “commercial” scripts. Reading Boyz N the Hood<\/em> reconnected me to my roots; it blew my mind wide open. There was an entire world of stories that had yet to be told, and as one of the few black women in Hollywood, I was determined to find them.<\/p>\n

I was born in New Orleans<\/a> in 1959 to Creole<\/a> parents. Racism was insidious at that time in the South, so my father, a biochemist, and my mom, an educator, packed up our Impala<\/a> in June 1965 and drove my sister and me to Los Angeles<\/a>. We settled into a modest home near Wilshire Boulevard<\/a> in the artistic community known as Miracle Mile<\/a>, near the famous LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/a>). I think my father hoped we could escape racism by moving us out West and putting us in predominantly white schools, but that was a misguided wish: We reached L.A.<\/a> just as the Watts rebellion<\/a> broke out, exposing deep racial tensions in the city…<\/p>\n

My colorblind bubble burst in fifth grade when the cute white boy who sat near me leaned across the aisle during a conversation about the Black Power movement<\/a> and asked if I was a Negro. Somehow, I’d buried my shameful childhood memories of using a clothespin to narrow my nostrils. I’d forgotten how my cousins and I would compare skin color, the lighter ones wondering if we could “pass<\/a>” like our grandmother was forced to do in her youth for survival…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hollywood’s Obsession With the Bottom Line Is Just Discrimination in Disguise Cosmopolitan 2016-02-25 Stephanie Allain Stephanie Allain has worked in Hollywood for more than 30 years, both in and out of the studio system. She’s produced award-winning films including Hustle & Flow, Peeples, Beyond the Lights, and Dear White People. Her next projects include Underground, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8,20],"tags":[23133,23132],"class_list":["post-45894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-cosmopolitan","tag-stephanie-allain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45894"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45895,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45894\/revisions\/45895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}